Quote from: michaeldb on October 11, 2011, 01:10
-Open Notepad (or other plain text editor)
-Drag the .eps file into it.
-If it is an eps 8 file, you will see a line like this in the top few lines of the file (probably the second line):
%%Creator: Adobe Illustrator(R) 8.0
-If it is an eps 10 file you will see a line something like this (maybe the third line):
%%Creator: Adobe Illustrator(R) 13.0

You can also check for the following (should also be at top), which is independent of the AI version used to make the EPS:

EPS8:
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0

EPS10:
%!PS-Adobe-3.1 EPSF-3.0

Theoretically, you could also search the EPS for specific PostScript commands to determine which, if any, EPS10-only features are being used - i.e. could the EPS10 be converted to EPS8/SVG/etc. without losing anything - but I haven't dug too deeply into that.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on December 20, 2014, 18:22Thanks for bringing up that the checkout page - for Symbiostock it's the cart page - should have a notice. I've added one there as well. Here's a screenshot of the two places I've added text, on the front page and the cart page. Click on the thumbnail to see full size.

I should first reiterate that I am not handing out official legal advice, and everyone should check this with their own financial and legal consultants. But it seems to me that this kind of notification works just fine temporarily over the next few months for non-EU sellers to at least indicate to buyers that there may be issues. The situation is fluid and there is still uncertainty about how seriously any government outside of the EU (and some inside) takes these changes to VAT collection requirements.

If the minimum VAT revenue thresholds that we have now are reinstated before the end of Q1 2015, which I think is a strong possibility, the issue will be moot for most individual sellers and small agencies (like mine).  However, this could just be the tip of the iceberg as far as global taxation changes go over the next several years, so it definitely doesn't hurt to begin investigating options to deal with this properly.

The removal of minimum revenue thresholds in the new VAT collection scheme is definitely a pain and potentially a big blow to microbusinesses everywhere, but I would not be suprised to see the minimum revenue thresholds reinstituted by the EU in the coming months due to public pressure.  Even so, the draconian data retention and purchaser identification requirements alone are enough to sink the whole thing on privacy concerns and easily justify non-compliance for sellers outside the EU. 

If you are a non-EU individual seller, a brief warning on the checkout screen to indicate that you do not collect VAT, somewhat like Jo Ann has suggested, should be sufficient for now until the situation has been clarified by the EU commission and your local government (but obviously, consult your own lawyer).

Projecting this into the future: the current inconvenience caused by the EU's decision to require taxing online digital purchases at the buyer's location rather than at the seller's is nothing compared to what could happen if the United States and the rest of the world decides to play along.  28 VAT zones from the EU?  Meet 10,000 sales tax districts from the USA alone.

ImageMagick is super useful for batch manipulation of images:
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

Similarly Ghostscript for PS/EPS/PDF handling:
http://www.ghostscript.com/

Quote from: Leo on August 26, 2013, 00:20
www.blender.org - 3d imaging and animation suite (especially high class)

Speaking of Blender, has anyone tried out the Freestyle rending engine in conjunction with SVG export?  I've been meaning to play around with it to see if it might lead to a reasonable workflow for creating 2D vector files from 3D models.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.67/FreeStyle

http://www.geocities.jp/blenderyard/freestyle/svgwriter_b26/README.html

"Asset" is commonly used to refer to media files used as content in a larger project - i.e. a generic way to say images, video and audio clips.  Adobe themselves describe Bridge as a "digital asset management software":

http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html

Quote from: Leo on August 23, 2013, 00:42
In the end, I still need a way to profit.

I will freely admit that I haven't fully thought through all the implications of this idea, so it might be a bit half-baked but here goes....

• If a buyer from one symbiosite moves to another through the network search, that could be trackable by having each site append links to other symbiosites with a URL referral parameter unique to each site (ex. ?ref=leo).  This ref URL parm could also be passed as a chain (ex. ?ref=leo&bob&mary) which gets appended through each hop.  Probably should also be stored in a 30-day cookie by each site to allow for a window of opportunity.
  

• When a buyer purchases an image license on a symbiosite, a message is sent to a central server with the referral parms, image ids, license types and quantities.
  

• The central server keeps a running tally of intersite referrals.  Participating site owners have their Paypal email stored there.
  

• On a monthly basis, site owners are encouraged to voluntarily and optionally pay a percentage commission on their previous month's sales to any network search referrers based on volume with possibly an additional "tip" to a general Symbio fund (either Leo's personal account or some company if a dev. corp is founded).
  

• If participating site outgoing referral payments are also tracked by managing these payments through the central server, then a hall of fame/shame could be established on the central server to show who's sharing the love and who's not.  Also, as the network grows there really does need to be some way to prioritize the network search results, so sales and referral crosspayments could be used a weight for this.
  

It's hard to say if activating Google+ authorship on image sales pages is really a good idea at this point, since the feature is still fairly new and there's not a lot of hard data on the SEO results.  A couple of points to consider:

1.) This might modify the display of your image on Google to show your G+ profile image next to the search result.

This makes a lot of sense for a news story or blog article and Google says that it can increase the click-through rate (CTR) of the result - especially if you have a pretty face!  However, it's very possible that this can decrease CTR for ecommerce items, since at a glance the searcher might think the result is just an article or opinion piece and not something to buy.  My speculation is that these results could be unconsciously skipped when a buyer is looking for an item on a search engine, similarly to how our eyes have been trained to scan past ads without seeing them.

2.) This provides a claim of ownership on the image.

Although I don't know if they've outright stated it yet, it's very possible that Google will start using authorship in the future to collapse similar results and give higher priority to "claimed" pages and images.  In the case of multiple claims, it would make sense to give highest priority to the first authorship claim, although who knows if this is how it will really work.  With that in mind,  if you have your own portfolio site or self-hosted storefront, it's worth considering whether you would really want to enable authorship at an agency such as DT unless you can prioritize your contributing sites on your G+ profile.

Did you also get the keyword "four of a hind"?  It's important to get the variants in there.

Interesting reaction blog post from Microsoft today, who have a subscription program for the Office software suite.  In summary, they believe that software subscriptions are the future, especially when coupled with value-added cloud services, but the future might not be right now:

http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/05/07/software-subscriptions-progressive-or-premature.aspx

Some of the enhancements to the pure cloud services are interesting and make the monthly fee a slightly less bitter pill to swallow.  They've added Behance ProSite integration to the subscription for making a personal portfolio website ($11/mo value):

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/behance-community.html
http://prosite.com/

Also, it looks like they are adding file versioning to their included 20GB cloud storage which would be quite useful for backups and works-in-progress.

Quote from: Jetsetter78 on April 29, 2013, 16:56I do actually hope Toonvectors has better features, like Group/categories section like Animals, kids, education.

Categories are still a work-in-progress, but they are coming along.  I wasn't really happy with any of the existing category or CV hierarchies I looked at, since they are all clearly designed with photography and "reality" in mind - i.e. not dealing satisfactorily with the ambiguities, anthropomorphism, imaginary and fantastical concepts, artwork styles, design elements and layouts that are unique to illustration.

So instead, they are being built from scratch which is a time-consuming process, but I think ultimately a worthwhile effort.  I've been meaning to talk about what's going on with categories and the plans for them, so I'll try to put together a more thorough description of my category approach as a post in the Toon Vectors thread on this forum in the near future.

Quote from: sjlocke on April 24, 2013, 16:48
Zero.

There are different ways to interpret a divide by zero calculation, but one method is to treat the result as an infinite positive (i.e. RPD = +∞).

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!

I've kept a fairly open door policy thus far towards new "walk-in" contributors as I learn, experiment and grow, but it will likely be necessary at some point in the future to focus more on building up the success of existing contributors and restrict new ones to only those that I think might fit the mold of past successes or those who uniquely expand the catalog. 

I am definitely a fan of ClipartOf and see them as the #1 best model to emulate as a microstock agency.  There is no reason to be the dumping ground for millions of images when everyone involved, including agency, artist and buyer, can be much happier on a smaller scale with more care and attention to detail.

The Symbiostock phenomenon is also very interesting to me and I have been watching very closely and pondering the possibilities and pieces that I might want to contribute.  I think it makes a great deal of sense for every artist to have their own personal site for featuring and selling their work.  Not that this wasn't possible before, but the network effect puts a new twist on matters since it increases the likelihood of success.  This has the potential to radically change the dynamic between artists and agencies for the betterment of both.

Quote from: flamingolady on March 30, 2013, 16:34My questions to TV - are you a licensed business in the US (TX)? If so, could you please provide  your business information, appropriate business name, corporation name, DBA, or whatever? Is there an on-line TX site where we can verify your business as being legit licensed?

No, at the moment I'm (Chris Thoman) operating as a sole proprietorship.  Probably the only public record of note is my WHOIS record for the toonvectors.com domain which has my address and telephone number.  I'll probably at least file for an assumed name DBA certificate at some point, but I haven't done so yet.

QuoteDo you take out the necessary US state taxes (as many US sites do)?

I do not withhold taxes, although that might have to change in the future depending on how sales grow.

QuoteI hope you do really, really well, and so far I like your concept!

Thanks!

Quote from: Noedelhap on March 26, 2013, 22:34
Great, looking forward to it.

Some of the planned search updates are live now.  The maximum search results have been bumped up to 960 with a small plus indicator when there are more results available - ex. "Showing 1 - 48 of 960+".  I'm keeping an eye on the resource usage of this, but hopefully I can increase it again.

Different sorting options beyond the default relevance for search results have been added: Newest, Most Popular and Random Selection.  These can work a little oddly with a multi-term search, since the terms are OR-ed together by default so the search relevance is essentially discarded - probably why I left the sorting out in the first place.  Still, the new sort options can be useful for single-term searches and with search modifiers such as pluses and quotes - ex.  "Santa hat" or +Christmas +hat.

Image "popularity" is still used for search relevance tie-breakers, but the popularity algorithm has been tweaked a bit to help stop new images from being buried so much.  I have some ideas for further improving this which I've begun to experiment with.  There is also a deep hierarchical CV/category system under-construction that should help people get finer-grained results once that is integrated into the image similarity, browsing and searching results.

Quote from: Microbius on March 23, 2013, 08:58
Is the site getting an upgrade? just noticed it a down at the moment

No upgrade, both web servers decided to crash at the same time and failed to automatically restart.  I'm looking into the cause, but the site is back up and running now.

Quote from: Noedelhap on March 15, 2013, 05:24
Quick question: I noticed that the search returns only 500 hits. Since there are many similar looking files (black and white versions and color variations for instance), most files hardly get seen. Isn't there a way to show more results, or to sort the search on File Age, Number of Downloads, etc?

The current overly simplistic search interface is definitely starting to show strain with the growth of the catalog over the last year.  There are quite a few changes in progress for search that I hope to finish soon.  This includes more total results, additional sorting/filtering options and changes to the way relevance tie-breakers are calculated to provide a better balance between newer and older images.

Quote from: jareso on March 10, 2013, 22:18
Isn't there Moneybookers (now renamed to Skrill) supported in Russia?

Yes, although Skrill/Moneybookers is no longer supported in the United States which can be a problem for some agencies.

I think it might be worth pointing out that this is not necessarily Google's fault - or at the very least this is how nearly all search engines work.

Disabling right-click save (and out-of-browser drag) is implemented in JavaScript which is evaluated by a web browser and it's up to the web browser to implement that correctly.  However, web crawlers such as that used by Google's search engine don't usually run actual web browsers since this is prohibitively expensive. Instead, they just download the web page HTML source code, parse the information in the HTML and then selectively follow links in <a> tags and download referenced images in <img> tags among other activities.

Technically speaking, anyone who views a page that has images with right-click save disabled has *already* saved that image to their computer if they can actually see it.  It's downloaded to the local web browser temporary cache which is not exactly a secret location on most computers.  You can also view the source code for the page and do the same thing that Google does - just follow the direct image URLs on the page.  Also, in most cases, you can turn JavaScript off and bypass these types of restrictions - plenty of people browse the web with JavaScript turned off for legitimate reasons.

Quote from: luissantos84 on February 28, 2013, 16:54
categories are useless, who goes there anyway? a buyer, a designer, a contributor when looking/licensing a picture they know what they are going after so they type a few keywords, why going over categories and then over 5 million files

Categories are quite useful for search as well (in the sense of a controlled vocabulary).  Keywords on an image can be mapped into categories which in turn can be mapped back into search terms applied to that image - i.e. searches on synonyms, common misspellings, international aliases, etc. can better pull up an image that has been categorized.  Categories are more easily translated into other languages and category keywords can be updated and globally applied to categorized images in the search index.

With that being said, it is a time-consuming process to categorize images and disambiguate keywords, thus probably a bit too much to ask of a contributor to deal with directly.  However, internally managed categories can reduce the work burden on the contributor by allowing them to worry less about cramming every possible keyword variant into their metadata.

Quote from: toots on February 13, 2013, 16:33
As toonvectors is basically a vector site even though you throw in a jpg version, should we upload designs with e.g. "sample text", "vector EPS10 transparency" text within the design or would you prefer we left such text off the vectors along with their corresponding jpg's.

Placing text like that on some images sometimes gives a visual representation to buyers as to what the image looks like with text on, sort of bringing it alive if you know what I mean. It's the jpg version that you're including which I'm concerned about.

I wouldn't want to lose sales because I've included text, but there again I'm more for selling the vectors of which text is easily removable.

An excellent question.  As you point out, a good argument can be made for presenting both - i.e. sample text for buyers that plan to edit but want a feel for what's possible and blank copy space for buyers who might use the EPS or JPEG itself as is with no editing.

I do not currently have a facility for bundling multiple versions in a single download, although that's something to consider for the future.  However, I am not opposed to these kind of design variants being uploaded and sold separately.  That's essentially how color and black & white variants are being handled now - for example:

http://www.toonvectors.com/clip-art/collections/cartoon-chameleon-on-tree-branch/1412

It's helpful to me if variants are uploaded in the same batch, so they can be grouped and their metadata verified together.

Quote from: mtkang on February 13, 2013, 05:21
hi, can we upload vector made raster illustrations and 3d render raster illustrations?

At the moment, it is only EPS vectors with no raster elements to keep things simple and consistent.  A ~3000px JPEG is included in customer downloads for convenience, but I consider the scaleable and editable EPS itself to be the main product.

I've been pretty happy with how the Dropbox integration has worked so far on the backend, although there are a few bugs to fix (mostly my fault) and minor enhancements that I hope to make soon.

I had planned to implement a similar upload system for Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive this year to supplement Dropbox for those who would prefer to use them, but the need doesn't seem immediately pressing - also perhaps the trust level and sentiment around Google and Microsoft in the microstock world is not so favorable at the moment.

Quote from: KonaHawaii on February 01, 2013, 06:56
Technical question, if anyone cares:

I'm at a crossroads here:

A: place full size files above www (root) directory, or
B: Place full size files in a protected (by htaccess) directory, accessibly only by php channeled downloads.

You might want to consider an option C which would be to use a cloud storage system such as Amazon S3 for storing full-size downloads and thumbnail files: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

There are some advantages to this over placing files on the site web server:

• Unlimited disk space and bandwidth metered outside of web host quotas
• Less strain on web server
• Ability to generate unique, expiring temporary download URLs for protected files
• Option to use global content-delivery network (CDN) for speedier thumbnail loading

Just a thought...  I use something similar for toonvectors.com (albeit Windows Azure instead of Amazon).  I'm not terribly familiar with WordPress development, but I'd be surprised if they didn't already have an S3 plug-in for site assets that could be adapted to the upload workflow.

Thanks for the kind words everyone.  I'm on vacation this week with a somewhat spotty Internet connection, so the submissions review and approval process has ground to halt, but business as usual should resume at the end of the week.